I'd summarize it as a mash up of Minecraft with less artistry and more resource management, and Dwarf Fortress with less insanity of match tables.

I played for about 5 hours lastnight, and was blown away. I made an enormous base that produced the second to top tier products, not much of them, but producing nevertheless. Just as this was happening I started to mine out most of the coal and copper and iron that was fueling all this, and the closest patches were pretty closeby, so I figured I should expand. As I was expanding, I started getting attacked more frequently, so I panned back to try and see where they were coming from...

Turns out my entire base represents MAYBE 5% of the total map. It takes me about a full minute of solid walking to cross my base, and it takes about that long to walk to the next patch of resources. Meanwhile, because I was so slow in building, the enemy (which sort of resemble the zerg, and need to be pushed back or they'll attack you periodically) has basically surrounded me. So my next order of business is arming up, getting in my car, and murdering some bugs so I can get more iron, copper, coal, and oil. Once I get those resources, they'll be too far from my base to use easily, so I'll probably have to build a railroad looping between them.

Oh, and there's multiplayer, because why not.

Anyone else playing? I've had the typical internet experience of being proud of my creations, only to see a solution presented by someone else that puts me to shame.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

I've played a bit myself, though a good while ago. Never got much past producing Science Pack IIs or whatever they were called before my assembly lines turned into an ugly jumbled mess. Good game, good fun.

existential_elevator wrote:It's like a jigsaw puzzle of Hitler pissing on Mother Theresa. No individual piece is offensive, but together...

If you think hot women have it easy because everyone wants to have sex at them, you're both wrong and also the reason you're wrong.

I've put about 26 hours into my current factory. This game is maddeningly addictive.

My factory has been completely solar for a little bit now, but I finally completely ran out of coal and stone, which are required for some recipes (explosives, plastics, electric furnaces, etc). To try something new, I built a train over to the nearest coal patch, which by car was like a full minute drive away. The trains are fast. And huge. A single 60s pause of the train at this coal patch brings my base a stupid amount of coal. So... What do I do with all this coal?

Oh yeah. The same thing you do every time you attain a new tier. Don't make one laser turret, automate that shit and make one a second.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

Same. I know one person from Twitter playing this, and they just gave the impression of a fun base-building game with resource management/etc. Didn't realize there was combat and stuff too. This sounds way cool.

To be fair, the combat is quite simplistic and needs some work. Thankfully, the game is only in .12 (updated today to v.122)

For example, my current strategy for killing alien bases (which you need for 'Alien Artifacts', which are used for research and some high tier items) is getting in my tank, and riding over the bases. All other strategies of circling while shooting or running the aliens back to my laser turrets is actually kind of iffy.

But it is neat that you can't just expand to your hearts content, since the aliens will fuck shit up, and after a few hours of game play will be powerful enough that you'll need a well defended perimeter.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

I find that I TRY to do things like set up lines specifically for electronics, for gears, etc, but no, I have to make things complicated by having several groups of factories making iron plates, etc. Game is supposed to be about automation. Haven't set up automation of my power plants yet, nor my labs. I just grab my science things from their boxes, and run over to the labs.

Rookie move bro! The scales of projects at the beginning mean you can manually insert stuff, but things scale up fast. For example, the later research objectives take 300x red, green, blue (and purple!) science packs. The blue science packs take smart inserters, batteries, and red circuits, which means you need 9 green circuits per. Batteries also require an oil chain for the sulfuric acid, which, being a liquid, you can't hold.

Yet another startup. So I've automated my labs with the red and green research packs. I'm only JUST getting started with oil. Blegh, I have huge amounts of extracted junk that I don't want to turn into fuel because later on you research how to make it useful, but I keep getting backed up with too much fuel. I've taken the liberty of using spare production capacity to have an assembler make more assemblers (uses the same stuff as inserter, circuit gear iron, so it's on the line, and you can have two of them working in tandem to produce blue assemblers). But then I tore that down, because what am I going to do with 100 blue assemblers? For now anyway. I've also set up a solar panel production facility, because of I course I want to. I don't like the electric stove thing, but I hate having to feed my smelters coal and I don't want to rearrange everything just because the electric one is fat...

I hate having to manually get out and grab sulfur and batteries etc, so I'm going to work on setting that up to automatically run. Because that's the point of the game, I think. Once I figure out how to get a blue flask factory, I'll get a tank and just slaughter everything.

So anyway, about the mobs. Do biters attack pipes? I want to set up pumping stations to pipe in oil from miles away, but not if the biters will eat the pipes. Once I've figure that out, it's on to the next tier of the game; robots slave armies!

I have most of my assemblers set with an upper limit to what they can produce. Either by having their output only have limited space, or using smart inserters with logistics network filters in place.

New strategy for taking out biter bases - personal robotics port, a dozen construction robots, and a blueprint that's got a wall, two laser turrets, and a long distance power cable touching the two turrets. Plonk -zapzapzapzapzapzapzap, advance, plonk -zapzapzapzapzapzapzapzap, repeat.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

So I keep restarting before I get deep into the game. Anyway, so I've got my method down. Basically, intermediate products virtually never appear on my map . I set my assemblers into 'complexes'. For example, here is my smart instertor complex.

Spoiler:

Note that the regular insertors still go to the labs as well. If there are delays, the regular insertors keep being produced while the smart ones get delayed. I'm trying to get EVERY product formed basically like this. This guy only has two ingredients, copper and iron. It'll be a bit harder the set up things with plastic and dear god fluids, but in another game I got batteries set up so, I'll figure something out.

Conveyor belt complexes are much simpler. Only one ingredient, iron. Two in the late game, when you get oil, but that's not TOO hard to add in. At the end, have the underground pipes insert the lube to the proper factories. What I dislike about making converyor belts, is the damned splitters. Underground belt? Just take the previous underground belt, add some more gears, and done. But splitters. You can't take the basic version and upgrade, you have to use the conveyor belts of the same type and add circuits to them...

That's a good idea as means of simplifying belts. You're limited by the output rate of the assemblers making the intermediate products, but I suppose that's the trade off. Neat!

You have your final products dumping off into a chest, which I presume you're manually grabbing? When you get the logistics network going you can output into provider chests, and they'll get delivered wherever you need.

One of my goals for my future design is to organize things better, making more use of the logistics network. Instead of having long meandering belts that are mashed with different combinations of things, I want to use requester chests to place the things I want nearby.

No, the chests are a placeholder for now; I keep restarting, but I just wanted to fiddle around with minicomplexes. but they would eventually be loaded onto a belt with plastics, batteries or steel on the other side, fed to a blue flask factory. Or just stockpiled until I have enough smart insertors to last me forever, then fed to factory. As for the inserters, the intermediaries tend to keep up fairly well. When I had 8 wire makers placing onto a belt, they simply could not find enough room on the belt and only a few of my assemblers down the line could work. So this way, no belt clutter. Well, other than the raw resources. Oil will be much more complicated, but again I'm trying to avoid complications. Anyway,

CorruptUser wrote:When I had 8 wire makers placing onto a belt, they simply could not find enough room on the belt and only a few of my assemblers down the line could work. So this way, no belt clutter

I think the trade off here is that you avoid belt clutter. The downside of this is if the final tier product is using materials faster than the intermediates can load them, the bottleneck is on the intermediate assemblers. It's still a nice solution, but having belts packed with inputs can mean faster assembly of final products than intermediate assemblers feeding directly into final assemblers.

CorruptUser wrote: Oil will be much more complicated, but again I'm trying to avoid complications.

Oil isn't actually THAT bad - it's it's own supply chain, but it's fairly simplified. Oil in, petroleum, heavy oil, and light oil out. Heavy can be cracked to light or lubricant, light can be cracked to petroleum. They can all be fed into 'solid fuel' production which is only really useful for a few things, including the final rocketry stuff.

Sulfur and plastic comes from petroleum, and are used in a couple of things. But the gyst is that it's simply processed elsewhere and then the intermediates (sulfur and plastic) can be used as normal products. Lubricant is the only semi-tricky one, but engines aren't really in terribly high demand, so one or two assemblers can easily produce all you need, even when fed into electric engines for drones.

The annoying thing about oil is how it can be trickier to acquire. I ended up setting up an enormous reservoir chain, and transport by train empty oil drums to my off base pumpjacks. Now in base I have a requester chest asking for full oil drums feeding into the whole thing.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

I've figure out oil, but it's a mess with the switch to advanced cracking, since I forget with input gets water and which gets crude. So there are a number of liquids to keep track of. Water, crude oil, petroleum gas, light oil, heavy oil, lubricant, and sulfuric acid. Odd that you need to turn petrol gas into sulfur first then back into sulfuric acid. Nice that coal finds a use in plastics around the time I'm switching to solar and replacing all my furnaces with electric (trying to avoid pissing off the native; absorbing pollution makes them grow stronger, popping their nests early does this as well, but better to kill then for them to absorb a bunch before you kill). Anyway, this... complicates things for factory complexes. You can rotate the entry point of the lube and sulfuric acid, which makes things easier. The underground pipes are my friend. In a future update, they may add in underground sections, or a late game thing when the colonists arrive, where you have to feed them or fulfill production requests or something. Underground sounds interesting, but terrifying; would be nice to keep my conveyor belts out of the way, but just keeping track of it all, ugh.

I'm up to robots, and blueprints. Going to have to tear down my entire factory to integrate them properly. But basically, belts will provide only raw mats and plates, intermediaries next to each other if possible, but my factories building complex machinery and modules and so forth will have to be fed with robots, because I can't ship plastic and steel halfway across my factory without screwing up everything. Especially since I plan to use robots to build my factory complexes, laser defense stations, solar farms, accumulator packs, etc, this means I have to have those things built in dedicated assemblers. I've noticed by this point, I have to murder the natives so they stop harassing me. I haven't needed trains because my deposits were big and rich, but now that I have the hang of it I'm tempted to start over with slightly less generous ore deposits, and have ores shipped in by rail.

Also, late game? Armor modules. Liking the nightvision and exoskeleton the most, though I don't have the fusion generator yet so the speed boost is only if I haven't moved in a bit. Armor and shields such is ok, but if I'm fighting from inside my tank it's not an issue. Really should get around to follower robots.

I downloaded .12, might as well start over again with the expiremental version. Concrete!

Rebuilt my refinery station the way I want. 5 oil refineries, all fluids organized in a maze of fluids which came out better than I thought it would. Will probaby tear it all again when I have to rebuild again when I decide 5 oil refineries isn't enough, but I have enough vitriol and lube for anything, which 5 battery assemblers, explosives plant, etc. I have more tank shells than I can realistically use, and that's with one assembler, doubt I'll need more.

Well, I'm loving robots, especially the personal roboport; instantly clear a forest. I tore down half my base only to realize that even with Rich deposits I'm running out of metals. I have 1 fast belt assembler complex, tempted to make another one, but I don't have enough iron at the moment. And everything is set up in a specific way, so it's hard to remodel again. But, I think this is what I actually wanted; set up a FACTORY, and have trains feed it by delivering all the ore. Just need to figure out how to set up my choo choos.

I'm going to stop bothering with belts for anything other than ores/metals, and just use the robots. I've set up a robot frame factory, so I have all the frames I'll need for a while. I haven't been doing too much with modules just yet, especially not the beacon thing, but I think I should. I've built only the modules to make the yellow assemblers (I'm in love) and efficiency modules to reduce pollution; after clearing out the nearby natives, they stopped bothering me, but some of their bases are BIG. Got bored and took my tank out for a spin, but this time I had made some tank shells. Big worms are now a joke unless in numbers, so long as I shoot them first. I find I can build a construction bot mid-battle, and that heals me a little bit until the poor bot dies, but whatever. If I ram anything with my tank, it dies.

I haven't played in about a week, but I've been mulling over redesign concepts. Something that occurs to me is that there are two main inputs (copper and iron plates), and instead of laterally expanding enormous tiers of intermediate products, producing modular sections that are internally balanced to output a singular thing. So the mainbus becomes a massive fuckery of iron and copper plates and everything is built out from them.

Yeah... I'ma do that. Have to figure out how to balance build times and such, though I think CU's idea of having intermediate products dump directly into the next tier works well here, OR, you can feed stuff into a chest that has individual filters set in place.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

I'll add this to the list of games I'd play if I hadn't already lost most of my life to Kerbal Space Program and Minecraft and don't want to lose the rest of it entirely. It can keep Space Engineers company.

So in the middle there are 16 lanes of goods. 4 for iron, 4 for copper, 2 each for gears and circuits circuits, 1 each for steel, bricks, batteries and advanced circuits. Each set of 4 is spaced 4 away from the next set, allowing me to make combo lanes as needed to offshoot. Plastic just goes to red circuits. Not sure how to integrate oil and such, may redo that section, but since plastic is only used by advanced circuits it doesn't get a lane and I think I can have the lube and vitriol in between. If I need anything at all, it can get an offshoot down the line. It isn't too modular and I'm limited to 4 sets of iron and copper mines, but it provides easy production and if I ever actually need 20 lanes for iron I'm doing pretty good I guess.

I've found some really cool designs on /r/factorio and the factorio forums. I haven't dismantled much, but I did set up a t3 module production line. Just a single chain, all fed by logistics, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut I didn't realize how slow they are to produce. Once they churn out sufficient modules for the power armor, I'll redesign.

I ran into a couple small bugs, that actually mucked things up. Mainly, train cars can't be loaded/unloaded if the square you're grabbing from is also over a junction. So I have to rekajigger some of my trains.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

Yeah? I put it down for now but have been thinking of ideas for expanding more efficiently.

For example, your idea of having intermediate products made next to the stuff that requires them is in some cases a super good idea - copper plates -> copper wire is better to do on site, because you get 2 wire for each plate.

So much reorganizing to do.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

Got you too? Hee, play the unstable version (at 12.8 for now, will be 13 soon), it's stable enough for now, but you get concrete and stone paths . Oh, personal robotport too, so your robot slaves can build anywhere instead of just your base.

Holy bleeping bleep. Do not start playing this game at 11:00pm, you will see sunrise. There's something incredibly compelling about getting to extract/convert/collect more and more resources. You're always going to want to try to fit in one more small project/upgrade to your production line before you go to bed.

I wasn't one for much planning so my current production line's kind of a mess. I put in the raw resources to make science packs 1 and 2 at the start of the line. At the end I have some smart inserters to grab the science packs and put them in a loop of science labs. In between is a long line of factories and blue factories to make all the intermediary goods. I have a recycle feed to try to keep things processing until they turn into science packs but my production line gets clogged up pretty often.

I'm in the process of taking the time to tear down my entire factory and rebuilding it from a central bus of 2-3 lanes of iron and copper plates. I'm about ready to start working towards a space launch (wooo at *only* 38hrs!), so figure why not.

FYI, the record right now for multiplayer games to satellite launch is ~4 hours.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

I got this game recently and have been enjoying it a lot, however, I can't seem to make it work in multiplayer, which is a shame because I originally bought it to play it with my brother. There is some trouble concerning the forwarding of gates that I just can't seem to resolve.It is very addictive and I seem to jump from exciting project to exciting project within the game. It's difficult to focus on one thing since you often find a new limiting factor which must be fixed before you are finished working on the first task.

3fj wrote: "You, sir, have been added to my list of deities under 'God of Swedish meat'."

So... going to start again, try to figure out circuits. Saw what people did online with their circuit factories; rather than have huge complexes for each type of basic item, people use circuits to have very compact factories that will switch on or off each assembler depending on what you want, telling the factory to only produce, eg, smart inserters until 100 are made, then turn off and produce blue assemblers instead.

Also, going to try efficient copper/iron lines. Basically, you can do up to 32 steel/electric furnaces with fast belts per output, should get me enough for whatever I desire .

I have almost all my outputs gated by smart inserters to keep the level in the logistics network somewhere above 100 and less than 4 billion. I'm not switching recipes in assemblers (can you even do that?) but gating your outputs by your network is pretty easy.

It's especially easy if you have a logistics network fed setup. Belts are good for moving lots of things, but most of the things you end up producing in game you don't need 1000's of at all times. For example, I had my laser turrets, solar panels, and substations set to about 200. Whenever I placed more (from the network), the network would allow more to enter the system.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

Izawwlgood wrote:I have almost all my outputs gated by smart inserters to keep the level in the logistics network somewhere above 100 and less than 4 billion. I'm not switching recipes in assemblers (can you even do that?) but gating your outputs by your network is pretty easy.

It's especially easy if you have a logistics network fed setup. Belts are good for moving lots of things, but most of the things you end up producing in game you don't need 1000's of at all times. For example, I had my laser turrets, solar panels, and substations set to about 200. Whenever I placed more (from the network), the network would allow more to enter the system.

You connect smart inserters that feed your assemblers to the network and turn them off and on depending on conditions, but all the assemblers connected to the same line.

But anyway, I haven't really used networks. I'd just have my final assemblers feed things like solar panels into a box that could only hold 200 or something like that. I guess with networks all the assemblers could feed into the same box.

CorruptUser wrote:But anyway, I haven't really used networks. I'd just have my final assemblers feed things like solar panels into a box that could only hold 200 or something like that. I guess with networks all the assemblers could feed into the same box.

If you haven't played with the logistics network, your mind is about to be blown.

But the gating you're describing is basically what I do with the logistics network - the network is analogous to a large box.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

My first factory became a sprawling mess. I essentially had two belts, one for coal and ore, one for everything else - and even then I had some overlap so I had a few points where green arms were either pulling ore from the parts belt or plates from the orebelt.

I do plan on revisiting it, but the major problem I found was a severe I/O problem. Basically one part would overproduce and flood the belt, locking it. Once locked, my orebelt would then shut down too, leaving everything stuck until I manually cleared the item belt.

I started on a second map to test a theory. Rather than one belt, I've got five, and the fourth splits in to two other belts, and one of those splits in to two additional looped subbelts. Of the ... Seven? Belts, only four of them loop.

I have an iron ore and a copper ore belt. Those I don't count as looping, though they do loop in a 2x2 loop at the end. They do feed into boxes. The boxes feed to a belt that furnaces pull from.

The coal belt feeds the boilers and the furnaces and loops. At this point, it doesn't move but who cares, it's coal so as soon as something needs some, it clicks forward one coalchunk.

The furnaces, through a rather large network of arms, feed three boxes. These boxes feed a belt that dumps the plates into the splitting line. the first split is by green arms that put iron plates on another line, but also feeds some of the copper back in via splitter. The segment that is cooler only goes to copper wire production and technically loops back, but is actually caught and fed into boxes that feed back to copper wire . The other half goes to split into one path for circuit board production and gears, and the other half to orange arm and yellow belts. The circuit boards and gears are fed back into this line. It then splits again to fuel blue factory production., and loops back to the start of the split so that a gear gets a chance to be anything.

The orange arm and yellow belt production dumps to boxes that feed to green science producers, and crap, forgot a split at the start of the plate lines that feed a gear maker and red science kit producer. Both those complexes feed a belt that runs by science labs.

And now I'm going to ignore it. I may pull a line off the coal, I may not, to fuel a new ore/factory complex, but right now? I can just sit and wait while red and red/green research just happens. Because of all the boxes, if a line is clogged it will just keep producing and storing into the thousands before that gets clogged, and the line behind it will keep going and so on, and at no point will power shut down because the ore line is clogged up.

I know, basic shit, but I find it neat.

I guess my main problem in my first factory was viewing both space and ore as quickly exhaustible resources. Neither one is.

I should also point out that when I say "copper wire factory" I really mean an arm that dumps copper plates into a box, three arms that feed three copper wire factories, and a small arm and belt setup that feeds either a partbelt for the factories that need it, or the box that directly feeds the three factories that need it.

Basically, when I say "Factory" I really mean three.

I imagine this will expand to 50 factory buildings in the future. Still, it's becoming a useful way for me to think of it - it's not "a" factory that makes copper wire, it's a network of multiple buildings, boxes and arms that composes one factory.

heuristically_alone wrote:I want to write a DnD campaign and play it by myself and DM it myself.

heuristically_alone wrote:I have been informed that this is called writing a book.

Izawwlgood wrote:It doesn't really matter though if belts become full. There's nothing negative or wrong about a non-flowing belt really.

Assuming the belt has only one kind of material on it. If it has more than one - or if you're running a supply chain off one belt - it can lock due to a Catch-22 - shops making higher level gear can't find the intermediate stuff they need because the intermediate builders can't put things down because the belt is full of plates. Or if you're running both copper and iron (and stone!) off one belt and the belt locks, it could be in a position where you stop making one kind of plate because of the lock.

But yeah, if the belt only carries one sort of material, locking doesn't matter.

heuristically_alone wrote:I want to write a DnD campaign and play it by myself and DM it myself.

heuristically_alone wrote:I have been informed that this is called writing a book.